Fidelis Leite Magalhães

Magalhães was raised in Maliana [de], the capital of what is now the municipality of Bobonaro in the west of East Timor. He is the second child of Manuel Magalhães and Regina Cardoso Gouveia Leite, who had five daughters and three other sons, including the PD politician Nívio Leite Magalhães [de], State Secretary for Youth and Labor from 2017 to 2018.^[2]

Manuel Magalhães was killed during the 1999 East Timorese crisis.^[3]

While still a child, Fidelis Magalhães joined the resistance against the Indonesian occupation. At the age of 13, he became a member of the Sagrada Família [de] (Holy Family), a resistance movement with religious features. Magalhães was also a member of a youth gang, Tuba Corente (Firm Chain).^[2] Members of that gang were searching for their identity, a process that could be "aggressive and even violent".^[4]

In April 1999, due to the wave of violence leading up to the East Timorese independence referendum, the Magalhães family had to flee from Maliana. Indonesian troops had burned down their house and arrested Manuel Magalhães.^[3][5] Fidelis Magalhães, then 16, took refuge in the mountainous jungle of the then Bobonaro district. For six months, he and a friend, Gilberto, lived on dried cassavas, roots, and the charity of jungle villagers, who were equally impoverished and starving.^[5] Magalhães remained in the mountains until the INTERFET forces arrived in late September 1999.^[3]

Following the departure of the Indonesians in the same year, Magalhães left school and started working for the Jesuit Refugee Services as a driver, to support his family.^[2] He also began to work in the field of human rights, under the guidance of Father Frank Brennan. At the end of 2000, he was promoted to the position of Human Rights and Refugee and Returnee officer with Jesuit Refugee Services. In 2001, he represented East Timor's civil society at the UN Session on Human Rights in Geneva. That was his first trip abroad, and he was asked to participate in a series of meetings only a year after he had begun to teach himself English. He has since described the experience as "surreal".^[2]

From mid 2001 to 2002, Magalhães worked for various organisations, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), where for a short period he was its Spokesperson and External Relations Assistant.^[2] He also served as the president of the Maliana Youth Committee, which consisted of all the youth organizations in the district.^[2]

In late 2002, Magalhães received a US State Department scholarship managed by the East–West Center to study at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He graduated with honours majoring in political, social and literary theories, and was also a top student in Latin American and Iberian literature.^[2] Under the same scholarship, he also studied for a short time at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.^[2]

From 2006, he worked in various capacities. In 2007, he was the Participation Expert on the national dialogue in East Timor for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit [de] (GTZ). In the same year, he was appointed head of the Post-Transitional Dialogue, which was funded by Norway. He then served as team leader on a number of initiatives, and was a principal adviser on development and political issues.^[2]

In 2008, Magalhães collaborated with Bishop Gunnar Stålsett, Norway’s Special Envoy to East Timor, in founding the High Level National Consensus Dialogue initiative. Some months later, he obtained a Chevening Scholarship to study Political Economy at the London School of Economics. After completing his studies at the LSE, he was awarded a Gulbenkian Fellowship to read International Political Economy in Lisbon, Portugal. While in Lisbon he also attended post-graduate courses in International Relations at the Higher Institute of Social and Political Sciences of the Technical University of Lisbon (ISCSP-UTL).^[2]